| I worked at JPL in 2007 as an intern in the planetary sciences group. Dysfunctional software to say the least. TL;DR ... if you hear the words 'IDL' Run! All of the analysis was done using IDL (interactive data language) which was a bit similar to matlab ... but seemed to be written by non computer scientists ... a big issue I seem to remember is a bunch of weird state accruing in your program (lots of global variables). It was also used to construct GUIs (think java widgets). What was icing on the cake though was the licensing. Each version had major incompatibilities, and the software was privatized a while back ... and sold back to NASA in the form of a network license (per version!) w only so many seats. So people's workflow would be to come into the office, see if they get a network license, and if not 'do other stuff' (unclear what that might be since the primary work was analysis). Then people were 'supposed to' give up their network licenses for lunch for a reshuffle. (So if you missed the morning window ... you'd work a bit into lunch to try and get a license for the afternoon). Craziness. When I learned about all of this madness, I found a way to get a student license / compile what I needed for mac os. (Which was still recently *nix based at the time). As a result ... I actually got something done that summer, which seemed to amaze my PIs. Since I surmounted one impossible feat, they asked for another. A 'competing' research group had data they wanted, but in an unknown proprietary binary format. They asked if I could crack it. If the mountain of evidence hadn't convinced me before then, that really convinced me that these folks were really getting hindered by their use of technology (and bureacracy! and the political forces being grant writing!) The thing that tickled me about that ask was they didn't understand how difficult it could be. And the thing that made me giggle was that it seemed like the cherry on top was there was likely to be a different 'endian-ness' btw their sparc servers and my mac. Oh! And heaven help the poor soul who was 'the IDL person' in the department. They never made eye contact in the cafeteria and seemed to eat really quickly. Everyone wanted some of his time. I ran across several heavily curse laden comments in the codebase from this person. That was probably their only salve. Also made me giggle though ... they were funny ... and probably on every person's computer in the dept though I doubt any of them had read the code enough to spot them. |
That said, this article reads like he's from a software engineering branch, not a science group.